-10

In theory someone could have five zero-score questions with 10k views each, earning them five Famous Question badges, yet they wouldn't even qualify for the Curious badge. IMHO, a highly scored question isn't the only quality metric. If someone manages to drive so much traffic, this has got to count for something.

I'm not suggesting to simply take views at their face value. As other have (rightly) suggested, questions can get traffic easily with spam links or by being too broad. I'm only suggesting that this has to count for something.

Improve this question
6
  • 2
    I agree. There are some categories of questions that tend to receive lots of views because they're quite helpful to the demographic of users who don't have accounts, but receive no votes because they're not that helpful to the demographic of users who do have enough rep to vote. I once saw a post here about a question which had tens of thousands of views, but no votes. It is worth noting, however, that while these questions don't count toward the count of qualifying days, they do count positively toward the question record score (minimum 50%). – Sonic the Curiouser Hedgehog Feb 9 at 9:41
  • 3
    I find it unlikely that a question with tens of thousands of views will never be upvoted. I see questions that are bad have upvotes, so if it's something popular, I'm not sure how it would evade upvotes. Although we can examine it from the other side - if there were 10k people who visited the question and nobody upvoted it, is it really a good question? Yes, 10k views doesn't mean 10k people with upvote privilege saw it but even if 1-2% are able to an upvote, that's 100-200 people who chose not to. – VLAZ Feb 9 at 9:55
  • "I'm only suggesting that this has to count for something." why? Presumably that's outside the badges about views. I'm not really sure what you want relevance views should have. They are, at best, neutral. The voting mechanism should very quickly correct a question being received neither good or bad. Is there really a problem with many question being left in limbo forever? – VLAZ Feb 9 at 10:01
  • @VLAZ Why? Well because I think this has to count for something but that is of course my own insignificant opinion and you are free to disagree ;) Whether that's a good thing to suggest is up for debate. Maybe it is and maybe this will be taken into account. Or maybe this is plainly stupid (probably is!) and you should perhaps just down vote this question. Who knows? Do you? – customcommander Feb 9 at 10:04
  • @SonictheCuriouserHedgehog It is worth noting, however, that while these questions don't count toward the count of qualifying days, they do count positively toward the question record score (minimum 50%). Thanks! Didn't know that. – customcommander Feb 9 at 10:05
  • A high percentage of working programmers likely have SO accounts, leading to decent upvote numbers for any highly viewed post. I doubt that's true for many other SE sites. If a question ranks well from organic SEO, it might get many views helping many people. But it's not going to get many votes, as those people likely do not have SE accounts on that specific site. – pkamb Feb 9 at 16:25
9

Its implausible that a high view-count post that's useful isn't going to get upvotes.

To an extent, traffic is also a poor indicator of hotness (I've between 3 months to a decade between posts to getting famous question badges) and you might have a high number of views on a post because its an eminently googled(or googable) issue, cause it was linked somewhere popular, has been around for ages or because your question got answered by John Carmack

These badges also commemorate different things - Traffic is good for a site in 'general, ad it brings in new blood. Curious isn't meant for that. Its meant to encourage people to ask good questions. While both involve visibility, votes indicate engagement with the 'core' members of the community. Traffic indicates people are looking for a post you posted.

Improve this answer
2

If a lot of people are showing up to a question, and more of them downvote it than upvote it…it’s probably not a great question.

There are plenty of ways to get a lot of views on a question:

  • Give it a really broad title, like “Implement a calculator in Java” that people will search and find it, only to discover that you actually need help aligning the buttons and that they’re not going to be learning how to build a calculator today.

  • Reload the page every 15 minutes, maybe with some bots. There’s no anti-cheating measures for views, because they don’t currently count for anything that matters (i.e., other than badges).

  • Spam links to the question elsewhere.

Basically, just viewing a question doesn’t indicate that it’s good.

Improve this answer
0
1

People love to watch drama and "bad stuff". TV shows showing murders get millions of views.

Does this make murder a good thing? I hope not.

Back to Stack Exchange: lots of views does not mean, in any way, it's a good question. Just popular, or posted by chance in some major place (e.g. popular blog, Reddit, etc), attracting lots of visitors who couldn't vote even if they wanted to.

Improve this answer
1
  • 2
    Or a good question, good answer, good SEO, posted to a SE site on which most people do not have accounts. example: 70k views, 2 votes – pkamb Feb 9 at 16:19

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .